We recently moved our dev environment to Azure, but our monthly bill is significantly higher than projected. We are seeing high costs in Azure App Service and unmanaged disks. What are the specific FinOps strategies or built-in tools we should be using to monitor and optimize our spend before it gets out of hand next quarter?
3 answers
The first thing you should do is check Azure Advisor for right-sizing recommendations. Often, developers provision "Premium" tiers for App Services when "Standard" would suffice. You should also implement Azure Budgets with automated alerts that trigger at 50%, 75%, and 90% of your threshold. For predictable workloads, look into Reserved Instances (RIs) which can save you up to 72% compared to pay-as-you-go pricing. Also, ensure you are deleting "orphaned" resources like unattached managed disks.
Have you looked into using Azure Resource Tags to track which departments are responsible for the highest spend?
Switching your Dev/Test environments to Spot Instances can save you a ton of money if your workloads can handle occasional interruptions.
Spot instances are a great call. I’d also add that Michael should check for any Idle Gateways or unused Public IPs, as those daily cents really add up.
Tagging is essential. By enforcing a "Department" or "Owner" tag via Azure Policy, you can generate cost-center reports in the Cost Analysis dashboard. This holds teams accountable for their own resource consumption and makes it much easier to identify who is leaving expensive GPUs running over the weekend without any active jobs.